"Calm
down! Calm down, he tells me. My kid vanishes into thin air somewhere
in the middle of Bangkok and he's telling me to calm down! Would you be
calm if it was your kid?"

"My
kid!"

"Yes,
your kid."

"Listen,
Mr. - "

"Sonenfeld."

"Mr.
Sonenfeld. Permit me to remind you that your boy is missing through no
fault of mine, and your belligerent attitude is not helpful!" The
officer, his beige uniform shirt open at his fleshy perspiring neck, glared
up at his interlocutor, but almost immediately his expression softened.
"I'm sorry, forgive me, that was uncalled for. You are upset, understandably.
Sir, madam, please, sit down, I'll have them bring you some brandy"
- raising his voice so it would reach the outer office, he said something
in Thai, at which Sonenfeld heard a chair scrape against the floor, followed
by brisk high-heeled footsteps - "and once you've settled down,"
he resumed, switching effortlessly back to English, "you can tell
me what I believe my American counterparts call 'the particulars'."
He smiled faintly. "Sit. You arrived in Bangkok when, exactly?"

It seemed
that Sonenfeld was about to launch into another tirade, but his wife touched
his arm and he subsided at once. "Last night," the wife said
in a soft voice heavy with weariness. "Late last night. I hardly
shut an eye all night. And this morning we were just walking, you know,
when - "

"Where
were you walking?"

"Where?"
Sonenfeld cut in. "How the hell do we know? Good God, we don't know
this city from... from Hades. We were walking single file: my wife in
front, me behind her, and Teddy behind me, me glancing behind every few
minutes to make sure he was there, though hardly doubting it, and the
last time I looked back he - he - "

"He
wasn't."

Sonenfeld
gulped air through twitching lips. "No. He wasn't."

"You
were walking - ah, here is your brandy. Sip, please. You were walking
in the vicinity of your hotel?"

"No,"
said the wife. "We had taken a tuk-tuk to Chinatown."

"Chinatown!
Yawarat Road?"

"That's
it, yes. Yawarat Road."

"She's
the one with the sense of direction," Sonenfeld grumbled acidly,
the first gulp of brandy making his head spin. "To me, it's pure
chaos. I think my vision is truer."

"We
were just walking, not going anywhere in particular, trying to get the
feel of the city, to get the lay of the land, so to speak. We were going
to just wander around today, and start our more organized sightseeing
tomorrow."

"Organized,
ha!" muttered the husband. "Her organization."

"Mine,
yes. Someone has to impose order on - "

"On
chaos? Why?" he shouted distractedly. "Why not just accept it
for what it is? Flow with it! Become one with it! Ha ha!"

"We
will agree," the officer interposed tactfully, "that to the
first-time visitor Bangkok can be the very image of chaos. Now listen
to me. I will dispatch a patrol to scour every inch of territory in the
Chinatown area. Chaotic Bangkok may be, but the laws of physics apply
here as elsewhere. People do get lost, yes, but they do not - as you put
it - vanish into thin air. We have faced this difficulty before, and believe
me, no visitor has ever yet had to return home without their children.
Okay?"

"Say
- how come you speak such good English?" asked Sonenfeld, as though
noticing for the first time.

The police
officer smiled. A missing upper front tooth gave him an oddly childlike
appearance. "Dostoevsky, I believe it was, observed that a mind under
stress is often preoccupied with the most irrelevant, the most trivial
questions. A man being led to the scaffold will see a blue building, for
example, and it will occur to him that it would look better painted red.
My English? Is actually better than my Thai. I was born in the United
States of Thai parents. I have a masters degree in criminology from Stanford
University."

***

Mark and
Madeleine Sonenfeld returned to their hotel. There was nothing to do except
sit and wait for a phone call that would tell them their boy had been
found, was safe, would be with them again as soon as the police car carrying
him could negotiate the traffic between Yawarat Road and Banglampu. The
tourist police officer who had taken care of them - he had told them his
Thai name and, grinning at their inability to pronounce it, said, "Just
call me Bill" - had counselled patience. "It's bound to take
at least a few hours; please, try to relax; a tranquilizer would be helpful;
trust me, I know my business."

Certainly
he seemed to, the distraught mother and father agreed. If Teddy was findable,
Bill was the man to find him. But how does an eleven-year-old boy walking
with his parents suddenly disappear? It defied comprehension. A main thoroughfare,
in broad daylight... "I'll never forgive myself," murmured Mark,
"for not walking behind him, keeping an eye on him. How could I have
been so stupid, so... irresponsible?"

He was
a big man, two meters in his socks and going prematurely to paunch, pacing
the little hotel room like a tiger in a cage. A fierce tropical sun streamed
in through the window. From somewhere a bus horn sounded.

"I
have never," he resumed in a voice throbbing with suppressed anguish,
"seen a city so utterly... utterly..."

"Chaotic?"

"Chaotic.
No. I was searching for another word, a word to put chaos in the shade,
a word that hasn't been coined yet, for only such a word could do justice
to this... this..."

"This
chaos."

He smiled
in spite of himself. "This is what happens when a writer marries
a critic."

"Turn
down the air conditioner just a bit, would you mind? Some day, Mark, after
yu've written a novel about this and I've criticized it, we'll all three
of us remember with a pleasant little frisson of terror how scared we
were, and have a good laugh over it."

"Shall
I tell you, in essence, the fundamental difference between you and me?
It's that even under the most benign circumstances I am alive to the underlying
presence of tragedy, whereas you, in the very midst of traagedy, see nothing
but comedy."

"'Nothing
but' is an exaggeration, Mark, a gross exaggeration, though what you say
is not without a grain of truth. Listen. I'm going to take Bill's advice
and try go get a little sleep. I won't suggest you do the same, because
I know you'll only bite my head off, but what I will suggest is that you
go out for a walk for an hour or two and let me get some rest, because
honestly, I didn't sleep at all last night and very little the night before,
and I can't think straight. Go. I'll be here by the phone. God willing,
when you come back I'll have good news for you."

"God
willing. Ha!"

***

Never had
he experienced such heat. He was a seasoned traveller, and climates ranging
from the equatorial to the sub-polar were familiar to him, if only in
passing, but this searing, choking urban heat that seized one by the throat
and seemed to fuse the brain to the roof of the skull had a quality all
its own, a malevolence against which he felt utterly helpless. If he didn't
give up his walk immediately and retreat to the air-conditioned comfort
of the hotel, it was only because the scenario sketched by his wife, of
him returning after a couple of hours and being greeted with triumphant
news, had taken such firm hold of him that he was determined to give it
time to materialize.

He warned
himself as he left the hotel to pay strict attention towhere he was going
so that he would be able to find he way back - he had, as he had confessed
to the police officer, a wretched sense of direction - but the heat, the
noise, the exhaust fumes, the crowds, all converged upon him with such
force that he was soon thrown into numb confusion. "Tuk-tuk, sir?
Where you go? See Sleeping Buddha? Fifty baht!" "T-shirt, sir?"
"Shoes, sir?" There seemed no human activity that was not represented
on these streets. Buying, selling, cooking, eating; on the bare sidewalk
under some kind of table a shirtless man was curled up, sound asleep.
Mangy wild dogs roamed about listlessly with their tongues hanging out,
their saliva dripping onto the pavement. "See sexy show, sir?"
A grinning child who couldn't have been more than three sidled up to him,
extending a paper cup. "Hallo! Hallo, good sir!"

A bus stopped
and opened its doors and, without thinking, driven by a furious desire
for rest, he boarded it. Only after the doors had closed behind him did
it occur to him to wonder where it was going. He was gripped by panic.
"My God - I don't even have my wallet with me! I'm in the middle
of Bangkok, in a bus going God knows where, and I don't have a cent on
me - not a single solitary baht!"

Dizzy,
he seized a strap and clung to it as though for dear life. An advertising
poster directly opposite him caught his attention: "Need help? Call
1699. Tourist Police." He laughed out loud, a harsh, raucous, monosyllabic
"Ha!" Heads turned towards him; he felt himself blush scarlet.

The poster
reminded him of Bill, who, he recalled, had said something about the laws
of physics applying even in Bangkok. "No one disputes that,"
he said, pursuing the argument in his mind with the officer, "but
does it not occur to you that he could've been snatched off the street
by some child prostitution ring, eh? The laws of physics have nothing
to say against that, do they?" It seemed to him that the possibility
only struck him after he himself had put it into words, and, as though
responding to a suggestion somebody else was making to him, he gasped
in surprise and pain. A slight woman with long hair tied back in a pony-tail
approached him, the top of her head barely reaching his chest. Around
her waist was a money-belt. "Three baht," she said. Frantically
he turned his pants pocket inside out. "Forgot my damned - "But
the wallet was in his hand. He gaped at it, stupefied.

"Three
baht," the conductress repeated, smiling and holding up three fingers.

"Yes,
yes, I... Three baht. Three baht." With trembling fingers he handled
the unfamiliar currency.

He got
off at the next stop. He was hopelessly lost. He seemed to be in the middle
of some kind of market, a maze of lanes crammed with tiny stalls purveying
everything under the sun: clothing, kitchenware, fruit, vegetables, spices,
cold drinks, movie posters, compact discs. Evening was beginning to fall.
"My God," he thought. "I've been in this city less than
a full day, and yet nothing, nothing is left to me of my former self!"
He laughed; it seemed an apt phrase. "I must remember to write it
down when I get to the - " Suddenly he stumbled, righting himself
with a violent, wrenching movement. "What the..." Looking down,
he saw what had nearly upended him: a large, gaping manhole. His senses
reeled; his head seemed to fill with the sound of deep, filthy, black
water lapping playfully against a cement wall. He felt as though he were
drowning in a sea of nausea. "Teddy!" Could the boy have fallen
into a manhole?"

***

A taxi
took him back to his hotel. "Hello, sir," said the doorman,
opening the door for him. The elevator was on the second floor and climbing.
He took the stairs three at a time. On the fifth floor landing he paused
momentarily for breath, then marched to his door and pounded on it. "Well?"
he demanded when Madeleine, after what seemed to him an age, opened it.
Before she could answer, the phone rang. For a split second Mark had the
crazy impression that the ringing was issuing from her open mouth. "I'll
get it!" he cried, brushing past her. He snatched the receiver. "Yes?"

"Mr.
Sonenfeld?"

"Yes."

"This
is Bill."

"Yes."

"Wait
just a moment please."

"Dad?"

"Teddy!
What the hell - where - my God, do you know what - "

"Teddy!"
Madeleine shrieked. "Oh my God." And for the first time since
the ordeal began, collapsing in a heap on the bed, she burst into loud,
broken, wrenching sobs.

***

When Mark
and Madeleine insisted on taking the officer out for dinner as a token
of their gratitude, he surprised them by suggesting, in all seriousness,
that they go to McDonald's. "How'd you like to go to a Bangkok McDonald's,
eh, boy?" he said, chuckling and rumpling Teddy's thick curly blond
hair. Teddy's delight suggested to his parents that Bill, among other
evident attainments, knew a thing or two about child psychology. "It's
a pretty poor return," Mark began, but Bill cut him off with a laugh.
"Return for what? All in a day's work, all in a day's work! And it
so happens that nothing would quite hit the spot right now like a simple
hamburger and coke. For tomorrow night, I'll give you the name of an authentic
Thai restaurant that few tourists know about."

"Be
our guests."

"Thank
you; unfortunately I have another engagement."

The facts
of Teddy's disappearance had turned out to be simplicity itself. Captivated
by a market vendor selling CDs, he had stopped, unnoticed by his parents,
to browse, and by the time he had browsed his fill they were hopelessly
separated.

"Were
you afraid?" his mother asked him.

"No
way! I could've taken a tuk-tuk to the hotel!"

"May
all my disappearances end so happily!" Bill said.

"I
thought you said they did," Mark murmured.

Arriving
at the restaurant, Mark and Madeleine were astonished to see a roomful
of small children - there was not an adult among them - leap up from their
tables and run delighted to greet the officer. Some of the youngest ones
jumped up and down in their excitement. The older ones, more dignified
but no less happy to see him, saluted him with a barrage of gleeful chatter.
At one point, evidently having heard something pleasant, Bill threw back
his head and laughed without restraint, the missing tooth, though in all
likelihood knocked out in a barroom brawl or in a street fight for dear
life, once again conveying to Mark an oddly childlike impression. Bill
said something to the children, who settled down at once and, to Teddy's
shrinking astonishment, suddenly turned to him, solemn but friendly, to
extend their greetings. A boy who looked to be the oldest among them -
he was about Teddy's age - extended his hand in a very grown-up way and
said in shy English, "Hello. Welcome." Rising to the occasion,
Teddy shook hands with the boy, at which the others, down to the very
youngest who were scarcely of an age to walk unassisted, formed a ragged
line, each waiting his or her turn to shake the newcomer's hand. The ceremony
complete, the oldest boy said, in accented but reasonably correct English,
very solemnly, "Come with me to my table. My name is Tinsulanonda.
Call me Tim."

With a
last backward glance at his parents, Teddy allowed himself to be carried
off. The Sonenfelds followed Bill to an unoccupied corner table. "What's
this all about?" said Madeleine, laughing.

"I
wanted you to see it. It's a sort of Big Brother program I'm involved
in. Involved in - why be modest?" An irrepressible boyish grin suffused
his features. "I founded it. The children are all orphans. The boy
Tim is half American, as are two of the others. First dad vanishes, then
mom soon after. Old story. Every Sunday night we have dinner here. Well!
What would you like? Big Macs, fries and cokes?"

When Bill,
having placed their orders, returned from the counter, Mark asked him,
"Do you have any children of your own?" To his surprise, Bill's
face clouded.

"I...
I'm sorry, did I - "

"No,
no, it's all right, it's all right! Mrs. Sonenfeld, you did say hold the
mustard, didn't you? Not to worry - no problem! Look over there - your
boy is one of the gang already. He's a fine boy, a hard-core hockey fan,
he tells me. Perhaps they'll be able to get together again before you
leave. We'll see if we can arrange something. Ah, she's calling us - our
order is ready, I'll be right back. No, sit - I'll get it."

Bill returned
with a heavily laden tray. "Here we are, no mustard and ice coffee
for madame, cokes for us. Fries, salt, ketchup... we're set. Forgive my
momentary... my momentary what? What's the word I'm looking for? Lapse?
You ask about my children. It's been twelve years, twelve years... But
time, you know, is never what it is, always what it seems. Sometimes it
seems a million years ago, other times it seems yesterday, other times
still, tomorrow. My son was a schizophrenic, Mr. Sonenfeld. Two days before
his twentieth birthday he... he committed suicide. He dived head first
from his bedroom window. Our apartment, where we lived at the time, was
on the seventh floor. He heard voices, you see. He was on medication.
Sometimes the medication stilled the voices. Sometimes it only made them
shout louder."

"Mr.
- er, Bill, I - "

"Please,
please, there is no need. Shall I tell you a thought which sometimes occurs
to me? It is that the voices my son was hearing were telling him the truth
- that he, who could hear the voices, was really sane, whereas we, who
are deaf to them, are insane. His sanity, of course, made him unfit for
life on this insane little speck of dust floating in a remote corner of
space... And so maybe - maybe he was diving to the center of the universe,
where the truth prevails, and where he was welcomed with open arms, a
lost soul who had miraculously found his way back home. Do you think that's
possible?"

"I
- I'd never thought of it that way before," Mark stammered, "but...
yes, now that you mention it..."

"Here."
With some difficulty the officer drew a bulky wallet from his pants pocket,
and extracted from the wallet a small photograph encased in plastic. "My
son."

The Sonenfelds
stared at the photograph intently, each apparently groping for something
to say, the right word, and, not finding it - for he seemed a perfectly
ordinary, though rather handsome, young man - maintaining an uncomfortable
silence. Bill replaced the photograph in his wallet and shoved the wallet
back into his pocket. "I'm getting fat," he muttered under his
breath, patting his thigh and wincing.

Somewhere
between fantasy and reality is the unexplored world in which Hoffmans
characters live. A man reading a newspaper is suddenly transformed into
a young god's elder brother. A foreigner in Japan, falsely accused of
assaulting a young girl, finds his innocence slowly slipping away from
him. Why did the woman in the restaurant scream? You would have, too.
In Bangkok a small boy goes missing; surely he didn't vanish into a manhole?
The empty cafe fills, reason unravels. In the novella Solitude,
the last of eight tales comprising this volume, Solomon Rose returns home
after 22 years to confront a dilemma soluble only by murder.

Michael
Hoffman was born in Montreal, Canada, and has lived in Japan since
1982. His short fiction has appeared in various North American and Japanese
magazines. He is the author of One-Armed Yatsu & Other Stories,
also available through 1stbooks. As a freelance journalist he is a regular
contributor of essays, book reviews and translations to Japan's English-language
media. He is co-author of the bestselling Tokyo
Confidential (The East Publications, Tokyo), a collection of tall
but true tales from the Land of the Cherry Blossom Blushing in the Rising
Sun. He is currently at work on a long, ominous novel set in a Japanese
backwater.